Romantic Wheeling: August 21, 1990

My platoon and I are stationed at Camp Casey in Korea for now and no one knows for how long. It feels like forever since I’ve been home, I can hardly remember what yall look like, I miss everyone a lot. No one can speak a lick of English here and it’s hard to communicate with the locals so we usually just trade food for supplies. The humid weather and all the flat land is a lot different from Wheeling. Growing up we walked up hill both ways to school and the store and what not. This place makes Wheeling look like the big city of New York does to us. I’ve been feeling homesick a lot lately, but you ain’t gonna believe what happened to me the other day. I was using a 5ft long breaker bar that weighed about 25 pounds to fix the steel tracks on a M60 tank and an M1 Abram Tank, we use a lot of heavy duty tools and it didn’t matter who made them. But on the particular tools I was using I saw it had Warwood Tool pressed into the steel. That right there made me feel closer to home than I have in a while. Warwood Tool has been around for 162 years and they are still making reliable heavy duty tools for the men and women of the Armed Forces today and that’s pretty amazing. Whenever I needed a tool I would always choose one made in my hometown of Warwood, despite the job. Later on I realized how many of the tools we used were from Warwood Tool. It’s kinda silly how a tool made me feel closer to home, but I never expected to find a little piece of home all the way in Korea. Hopefully I will see you all soon!

I will keep you updated.

With Love,
Uncle G

The Romantic Wheeling Project is a multi-genre place-based learning project where 12th grade Honors English students at Wheeling Park High School used themes of British Romanticism like Natural over Artificial, Emotion over Reason, and the Quest for Forbidden Knowledge to explore their emotional connection with The Friendly City that raised them. Students were to choose one landmark, neighborhood, or place in Wheeling to inspire their open form creative writing. The student wrote short stories, poems, songs, and played with other genres to express their connections and views of Wheeling through a Romantic lens.